John Pilger

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John Pilger

John Pilger at the "Humber Mouth" Hull literature festival 2006
Born October 9, 1939 (1939-10-09) (age 68)
Sydney, Australia
Residence United Kingdom
Nationality Australian
Occupation Journalist, writer, documentary filmmaker
Children Two
Website
www.johnpilger.com

John Richard Pilger (born October 9, 1939) is an award-winning Australian born journalist and documentary filmmaker from Sydney, primarily based in London, England.

Contents

[edit] Life and career

Pilger was born in Bondi, a suburb of Sydney. He attended Sydney Boys High School and founded a student newspaper there, the Messenger. He acquired his first job in journalism as a copy boy with the Sydney Sun in 1958, later moving to the Daily Telegraph. Pilger left Australia to work for the Daily Mirror in the United Kingdom in the early 1960s and has since been based in that country.

Pilger acted as a war correspondent during conflicts in Vietnam, Cambodia, Egypt, India, Bangladesh and Biafra. His reputation steadily emerged through both his documentary films and the books he has written. One of his first documentary films, Year Zero, is credited with bringing to world attention for the first time the atrocities being committed by the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia.[1] A number of his later documentaries have similarly focussed upon atrocities and human rights abuses perpetrated on civilian populations from the Israeli occupied territories, to Indonesian East Timor and Iraq under UN sanctions.

More recently, Pilger joined the News on Sunday as the editor-in-chief and suggested writers for it but he then left for Australia to make a film leaving editor Keith Sutton to manage the editorial floor. When he returned he was upset that his suggested writers had not been hired and he felt Sutton had usurped his role. He and Alan Hayling made a competing prepublication dummy and he later explained that Sutton's version "had to be undermined". The founders chose to keep Sutton as editor causing Pilger to resign from the paper. Pilger then wrote a series of articles critical of the paper.[2]

Pilger has won many journalism and human rights awards, including Britain's prestigious Journalist of the Year award twice, and he has a number of honorary doctorates. He has a son Sam (born in 1973) and a daughter Zoe (born 1984).

[edit] Political views

[edit] Western foreign policy

Since his early years as a war correspondent in Vietnam, Pilger has been a trenchant critic of Western foreign policy. He is particularly opposed to many aspects of American foreign policy, which he regards as being driven by a largely imperialist agenda.

[edit] Mainstream journalism

Pilger is a strong critic of the institutions and economic forces that structure 'mainstream' journalism. He said in an address at Columbia University on 14 April 2006:

“ During the Cold War, a group of Russian journalists toured the United States. On the final day of their visit, they were asked by their hosts for their impressions. 'I have to tell you,' said their spokesman, 'that we were astonished to find after reading all the newspapers and watching TV, that all the opinions on all the vital issues were by and large, the same. To get that result in our country, we imprison people, we tear out their fingernails. Here, you don’t have that. What’s the secret? How do you do it?' [3] ”

He is particularly scornful of pro-Iraq war commentators on the liberal left, or 'liberal interventionists', such as Nick Cohen and David Aaronovitch.

In addition to criticizing the policies of President George W. Bush, Pilger has also taken aim at former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, whom he believes to be just as culpable as President Bush for the invasion and occupation of Iraq.

In his column published in New Statesman on 25 July 2005, Pilger ascribed blame for the 2005 London bombings that took place the same month to Blair, whose decision to follow President Bush generated the rage that he claims precipitated those bombings. [4]

In the same column a year later, Pilger described Blair as a war criminal for supporting Israel's actions during the 2006 Israel-Lebanon conflict. He also asserted that Blair gave permission to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in 2001 to initiate what would ultimately become Operation Defensive Shield.[5]

[edit] Support of Hugo Chavez

Pilger is a supporter of Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez.[6] In May 2007 he co-signed and put forward a letter supporting the refusal of the Chávez government to renew the broadcasting licence of Venezuela's largest television network Radio Caracas Televisión, claiming they were openly supporting and colluding in a 2002 coup attempt against Chávez's government. Pilger and other signatories suggest that if the BBC or ITV used their news broadcasts to publicly support a coup against the British government, they would suffer similar consequences.[7] Other groups however, such as Human Rights Watch, Reporters Without Borders and the Committee to Protect Journalists, have described the RCTV decision as an effort to stifle freedom of expression.[8]

[edit] Diego Garcia

Pilger has written articles about the Depopulation of Diego Garcia by the United Kingdom during the 1970s. He has strongly criticised Tony Blair for not making any real response to the 2000 High Court ruling that the expulsion of the island's natives had been illegal.[9]

[edit] Praise and criticism

Pilger is known for his polemical style, which has attracted both praise and criticism. Harold Pinter has said of his work: "John Pilger is fearless. He unearths, with steely attention to facts, the filthy truth, and tells it as it is . . . I salute him."[1]. Auberon Waugh, on the other hand, coined the verb "to pilger", meaning "to present information in a sensationalist manner to reach a foregone conclusion".[citation needed] Noam Chomsky has claimed that the reason why journalists have invented the terms 'to pilger' and 'pilgerise' is because, when faced with the uncomfortable facts about the consequences of U.S foreign policy that Pilger presents, "ridicule [is] the only response they are capable of".[10]

Sydney Morning Herald columnist Gerard Henderson has been one of Pilger's most vocal critics.[11]

[edit] Career summary

[edit] Works

[edit] Publications

Pilger has written for or had articles published in the following publications:

He has also written for various French, Italian, Scandinavian, Canadian and Japanese newspapers and periodicals, among others, and has contributed to the BBC's news service. He is on the advisory board of UKWatch.

[edit] Selected documentaries

  • The Quiet Mutiny 1971
  • Do You Remember Vietnam 1978
  • Year Zero: The Silent Death of Cambodia 1979 Video
  • Nicaragua. A Nations Right to Survive Video
  • Japan Behind the Mask 1987
  • Cambodia: The Betrayal 1990
  • War By Other Means 1992
  • Death of a Nation: The Timor Conspiracy 1994 Video
  • Flying the Flag, Arming the World 1994 Video
  • Vietnam: the Last Battle 1995
  • Inside Burma: Land of Fear 1996 Video
  • Breaking the Mirror - The Murdoch Effect 1997
  • Apartheid Did Not Die 1998 Video
  • Welcome To Australia 1999
  • Paying the Price: Killing the Children of Iraq 2000 Video
  • The New Rulers of the World 2001-2002 Video
  • Palestine Is Still the Issue 2002 Video
  • Breaking the Silence: Truth and Lies in the War on Terror 2003 Video
  • Stealing a Nation 2004

[edit] Films

[edit] DVDs

[edit] Books by Pilger

  • The Last Day (1975)
  • Aftermath: The Struggles of Cambodia and Vietnam (1981)
  • The Outsiders (1984)
  • Heroes (1986)
  • A Secret Country (1989)
  • Distant Voices (1992 and 1994)
  • Hidden Agendas (1998)
  • Reporting the World: John Pilger's Great Eyewitness Photographers (2001)
  • The New Rulers of the World (2002)
  • Tell Me No Lies: Investigative Journalism and its Triumphs (ed.) Cape (2004)
  • Blowin' in the wind (2004)
  • Freedom Next Time (2006)

[edit] Play

  • The Last Day (1983)

[edit] Awards

Awards include:

  • Descriptive Writer of the Year (1966)
  • Reporter of the Year (1967)
  • Journalist of the Year (1967)
  • International Reporter of the Year (1970)
  • News Reporter of the Year (1974)
  • Campaigning Journalist of the Year (1977)
  • Journalist of the Year (1979)
  • UN Media Peace Prize, Australia (1979 – 80)
  • UN Media Peace Prize and Gold Medal, Australia (1980 – 81)
  • TV Times Readers' Award (1979)
  • United Kingdom Academy Award (1990)
  • The George Foster Peabody Award, USA (1990)
  • American Television Academy Award ('Emmy') (1991)
  • British Academy of Film and Television Arts – The Richard Dimbleby Award (1991)
  • Reporters Sans Frontiers Award, France (1990)
  • International de Television Geneve Award (1995)
  • The Monismanien Prize, Sweden (2001)
  • The Sophie Prize for Human Rights, Norway (2003)
  • EMMA Media Personality of the Year (2003)
  • Royal Television Society – Best British Documentary for Stealing a Nation (2004)

Degrees and honorary degrees:

[edit] Quotes

  • "There is no War on Terrorism; it is the great game speeded up. The difference is the rampant nature of the superpower, ensuring infinite dangers for us all."[12]
  • "More terrorists are given training and sanctuary in the United States than anywhere on earth. They include mass murderers, torturers, former and future tyrants and assorted international criminals. This is virtually unknown to the American public, thanks to the freest media on earth."[12]
  • "During my lifetime, America has been constantly waging war against much of humanity: impoverished people mostly, in stricken places."[13]
  • "In these surreal days, there is one truth. Nothing justified the killing of innocent people in America last week and nothing justifies the killing of innocent people anywhere else." (referring to 9/11)[13]

[edit] Footnotes

  1. ^ Arnold & Morris, p. 359.
  2. ^ "Lots of Balls". Lefties. BBC Two
  3. ^ John Pilger, Speech at Columbia University, 14 April 2006
  4. ^ John Pilger, Blair's bombs, 25 July 2005
  5. ^ John Pilger, The real threat we face in Britain is Blair, 17 August 2006
  6. ^ Chávez is a threat because he offers the alternative of a decent society
  7. ^ Television's role in the coup against Chávez
  8. ^ Chávez Looks at His Critics in the Media and Sees the Enemy - Simon Romero, New York Times, 1 June 2007.
  9. ^ http://www.antiwar.com/orig/pilger.php?articleid=3702
  10. ^ Noam Chomsky Chomsky Answers Guardian
  11. ^ Gerard Henderson's Media Watch The Sydney Institute
  12. ^ a b The journalism and films of John Pilger. Internet Archive copy
  13. ^ a b John Pilger Blair has made Britain a target

[edit] References

  • BFI interview John Pilger in conversation
  • Arnold, John & Morris, Diedre (1994): Monash Biographical Dictionary of 20th Century Australia, Reed Reference Publishing, ISBN 978-1875589197.
  • Who's Who in Australia 2008 - p. 1701.
  • Hayward, Anthony (2002). In the Name of Justice: The Television Reporting of John Pilger. Bloomsbury Publishing PLC; New Ed edition. ISBN 0747558981. 


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